Tag: battle of the sexes

Men vs. Women, Victoria's Secret, and Jeffrey Epstein Are All In Bed….

CORRECTION: In the piece, this writer wrongly posted that Lex Wexner is the founder of Victoria’s Secret. He is not. Wexner bought the store(s) from the actual founder and added it to his retail empire in the 1980s. The actual founder’s concept was that the retailer would be a place for men to purchase lingerie for their wives. Wexner turned the tables and marketed toward women. 
What if it is all a big lie?
Just like the possibility that Ancel Keyes’s hypothesis about fat and cholesterol in the diet making humans fat is most likely not true across the board, what if the battle of the sexes, men vs. women as it is sold to the masses, is just a way to play with minds and souls of Americans to give up our bodies for something sordid.
And what if an Ohio born billionaire was one of the main people to push what amounts to the message that women dressing like a sluts gets you love in the bedroom if nowhere else (but could lead to something much more gratifying) on an unsuspecting American public.
In one of a series of posts on July 8, Q, the master of all things conspiracy related, told the readers to look into Les Wexner, the founder of Victoria’s Secret, and as it turns out, newly indicted sex hound Jeffrey Epstein’s main client when he ran a hedge fund. Wexner essentially gave Epstein his Manhattan “house” that used to be a school sometime back.
Looking at the basics on Wexner’s bio, he’s 81 as of this writing, but only married in 1993 to a woman 24 years his junior. The couple has four children. For a lot of men, that, we are given to understand, amounts to a successful life. He was also a registered Republican until last year. Wexner owns a yacht. On the surface, he’s your typical successful self-made man.
Prior to his marriage, Wexner went into the women’s clothing business starting with the mall chain store The Limited, and gradually added brands to his empire, corrupting more than one along the way. Iconic label Abercrombie & Fitch was one that went from what was classically all American preppy to juniors exposure clothes practically overnight after its acquisition.
Wexner’s label that most titillates, though, is “Victoria’s Secret,” a lingerie, foundations, and intimate clothing line that played off the idea that no one really had any idea what was under Queen Victoria’s high necked, black bombazine dresses that she wore in memory of her late husband with whom she had several children.
The woman obviously had a sex life. Why would she have not worn animal print and black lace without the world knowing?
The thing is, racy and lacy underthings, so long as they are covered, are really left up to the imagination. Victoria’s Secret, once they branched out into clothing, made women dressing on the provocative side seem normal.
And THAT is really not the American way.
It was at the time Vicki’s Secret rose to prominence, though, playing into the insecurities of American culture that were being exploited at a number of different levels of entertainment, and the self help industry, and thus, messaging to the masses. Women everywhere were more or less told dress like this if you want a man, and the love and security that is supposed to come with him. That goes hand in hand with the publication of The Rules in the 1990s which told the ladies to be creatures unlike any other, pamper yourself, play hard to get, and never accept a date for the weekend after Wednesday. (Later came the dating sites that promised love and a relationship, but were really disappointing meat markets with $24.95 a month membership fee.)
Women, supposedly being somewhat fashionable creatures who tend to travel in packs, and often need the approval of other women before making decisions, had already gone through the early waves of feminism, which former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov claims was a campaign foisted on the world to break up the family. The bikini had come into our lives when previously exposing that much skin was just not done. The early novels of the romance industry that revived in the 1970s were known to feature rape, and bodice ripping which was fine so long as the hero of the novel was doing the deed. Television and movies programmed stories of women who were divorced, and making it without a man. The message was it was okay, and marriage really didn’t matter.
All of this was tossed into a culture where girls are taught from the cradle to be proactive in protecting themselves from men. Hopefully.
Why? Because men are not to be trusted. They are only after one thing. (And the irony of rape supposedly being a female fantasy doesn’t strike anyone as odd. Unbelievable.)
Of course, this is not universally true, but it is contradictory to the Victoria’s Secret message: men aren’t going to want you if you don’t dress this way, well under your outside clothes anyway. (And now, women’s “fashion” includes full coverage of spandex that leaves NOTHING to the imagination, and the poor guys have to look at the ceiling to keep from being called perverts.)
What a mess.
So what does this have to do with Jeffrey Epstein and Les Wexner?
Epstein, anyway, is turning out to be the proverbial dirty old man the girls were all taught to avoid. He, and Wexner by virtue of the products he sells which includes the amazingly smelly Bath & Body Works, are part of an industry that feeds into the American notion of men vs. women, the perpetual war spurred by self help books and videos, how to guides, and other assorted information widely available for people looking for love in all the wrong places – and taking it really personally when failure occurs.
And what is really sad, the result is the sexes not trusting each other and when it comes to that it does not look like much is going to change anytime soon.
A few years back, a marketing researcher for the big names by the name of Clotaire Rapaille, a Frenchman, wrote a very interesting book about his research into the American market. His theme is essentially that the American culture is young, very young, compared to other parts of the world, and growing up is not happening at this point. We successfully export the products of youth, but really have not begun to mature as a culture. In his estimation, sex, love, and seduction translate to violence, false expectations, and manipulation in the United States. As Victoria’s Secret was one of his clients, that puts them as part of the problem, regardless of Rapaille explaining away the issue in chapter 3 of The Culture Code.
And the founder of Victoria’s Secret more or less bankrolled Jeffrey Epstein in the beginning.
No, this is not a deep dive on either figure in the pedogate scandal. The main point is to recognize that they are players in perpetuating the objectification and sexualization of females at all ages. These are dots that need to be connected in the process of the diving for more information.
 

Democrats In White Forget That Phyllis Schlafly Was Right

On Tuesday evening when the women of the Democrat Party appeared in the House of Representatives Chamber wearing white jackets as part of their ensembles, there was a piece of flair on just about every outfit that gave this writer pause. It was a button that simply read “ERA YES.”
This writer’s memory of the original ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, that passed both sides of Congress with supermajorities, and fell three states short of ratification by its ten year deadline, was the failure of passage. (I was a kid.) The darn thing died in 1982 thanks to a campaign spearheaded by a woman hailed among conservatives by the name of Phyllis Schlafly.
Mrs. Schlafly passed away during the 2016 presidential campaign at the end of a fight with cancer which she had endured for quite some time. Headlines screamed that summer of her removing a daughter from the board of her Eagle Forum which spawned a lot of unfounded speculation. (The truth is the daughter, Mrs. Schlafly’s primary caregiver within the family, wanted her mother to rest in her final months, and Phyllis being Phyllis wouldn’t do it.*) At the time, this writer did some research on the fight against the ERA, and came to the conclusion that the women of the United States had Phyllis Schlafly to thank for saving them from themselves.
Mrs. Schlafly’s primary concern in opposing the ERA was not to stop women from being who and what they were meant to be, she did go back to school to get a law degree after all, but to protect the American family. At the beginning of her fight in the early 1970s, Mrs. Schlafly predicted that with the passage and ratification of the ERA, several social changes would occur that would be detrimental to the future of the nation.

Why “STOP ERA”? Phyllis Schlafly traveled across the U.S. throughout the 1970s calling for opposition to the ERA because it would lead to the following, most of which pro-ERA lawyers argued were not actually real threats from the ERA:

  • Homosexual marriages: traditional gender roles were, Schlafly argued, essential for preserving the family.
  • Women in combat: women, Schlafly argued, would weaken the military’s combat strength, and serving in the military would violate traditional gender norms.
  • Taxpayer-funded abortions: Schlafly, a … Catholic, ardently opposed abortion.
  • Unisex bathrooms: one of the best-known of the arguments Schlafly promoted, this was likely meant to create fear of losing a safe space. Schlafly argued that the ERA would also remove laws that depended on gender to define a sex crime, and that it would weaken laws about rape.
  • Elimination of Social Security benefits for widows: she believed women should not be in the paid workforce (though she herself was paid a salary) especially if they had young children, and so a Social Security benefit for women who had not earned their own benefits was essential to the mother’s ability to stay home.
  • Hurt families: She argued that the ERA would abolish a husband’s legal responsibility to support his wife and family, and making child support, that it would alter child support and alimony laws to make them gender neutral. In general, she argued that it would undermine the authority of men over women, which she saw as the proper power relationship for well-functioning families.

Many of these claims about what the ERA would do are disputed by legal scholars. On the other hand, some of these results evolved after the 1970s to become public policy, accepted by a majority of the electorate.
The Eagle Forum and so-called states’ rights groups warn that the ERA would transfer a great deal of power from state to federal governments.

Amazing isn’t it, that many of her predictions came true whether the ERA passed or not.
All these years later, Mrs. Schlafly’s ability to think logically down stream, as it were, and sound the alarm on so many issues that the people of the United States have been fighting in recent years did inspire Bloomberg, at least, to admit she was correct.
So if she was correct, and the ERA would have been a disaster for American women frankly by putting us on the same legal footing as men (can be drafted into the military, etc.), and it was defeated by the deadline imposed by Congress in 1982, why were the women in white pushing support for the long ago departed?
Basically, because they don’t believe it is dead.
In recent years, two states, Illinois and Nevada, ratified the amendment despite its cadaverous state. That means that only one more state would be needed for final ratification if Congress would only lift the time limit of ten years required for the ERA’s passage.

After its passage by joint resolution of Congress, the amendment had until 1982 to be ratified by the required 38 states. The deadline passed, but as [Alaska Sen. Lisa] Murkowski and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) wrote in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, a renewed effort to ratify the amendment at the state level began about two years ago, and was buoyed in part by #MeToo.
Nevada ratified the amendment in 2017, and Illinois did the same in 2018, meaning only one more state is needed to get to 38.
And, Murkowski and Cardin write, Congress could remove the deadline, allowing the amendment to become law if a 38th state joins in.
“Women should not be held back or provided less opportunity, respect or protections under the law because of their gender,” they write. “This is not a partisan issue but one of universal human rights. Gender equality should be an explicit, basic principle of our society.”

It looks like, now that Mrs. Schlafly and her ability to rally the troops and circle the wagons are gone, the women of the Democrat Party and the men who are too spineless to stand up to them are going to try to revive the corpse of the ERA regardless of the consequences.
The reality is that the Senate may well be the roadblock on this one as amending the original legislation would take a big vote, but rest assured, the other side of the aisle will keep pulling out all the failed ideas of the past as the generations go on and have no idea of why such measures were defeated and who is responsible for making such things come to pass.
* The six degrees of separation in Mrs. Schlafly’s hometown is really two, and this writer has information that was on the ground, but never reported about the family fight in question.